Self-Portrait in Bloom. Niloufar Talebi

matter of poetry

       from past poets was not life.

       ...

       The subject of poetry

       today

       is a different matter…

       Today

       poetry

       is the weapon of the masses

       because poets are themselves

       one branch from the forest of the masses,

       not jasmines and hyacinths from so-and-so’s greenhouse.

      Shamlou’s call to arms served as a manifesto of the new emancipatory poetics in which, following the prescription of his mentor, Nima, a poet must embody the essence of his or her time through an expression that is stripped of pretenses and decorative language. And this would be the measure of the best poets across time. Because life came first.

3. AIDA: MUSE, WIFE, ASSISTANT, STEWARD

      BY 1962, AFTER A SECOND DIVORCE and fatherhood duties dodged, Shamlou has moved to his mother’s house to start over yet again.

      Next door, from the upstairs bedroom window, a young woman spies on the man with the curly head of hair scribbling in the front yard. Her name would become Aida Shamlou, née Rita Athans Sarkisian on November 15, 1939, in Tehran into an Armenian-Iranian family.

      Mrs. Shamlou recounts to me by phone: Ahmad would stand by the lawn in the yard and sometimes I would stand on our balcony. We communicated through music, each playing a record on the gramophone in response to the other. Once he walked up to the balcony and asked whether my name was Aida, but I remained coy. Finally, one day I found Shamlou holding up to me on my balcony a placard with his phone number written on it. I blushed. We didn’t have a telephone, so I had to walk to the newly opened supermarket—the first one in Iran, I might add—where there was a public telephone. Our first conversation was fireworks. He talked about everything. I couldn’t believe it. He would fetch me after class at the college for secretaries and walk me home. We sat on park benches and he would talk for hours. I thought, who is this man?

      She continues: One day at dusk, there was a strange summer rainstorm. The next day I went to their house, but Ahmad wasn’t there, so I waited for him on his bed, with my back leaning against the wall. All of a sudden I turned around and saw a poem called “Aida in the Mirror,” written in pencil on the wall, dated the night before. I was stunned. Just then, Shamlou walked in and saw me reading it. He told me to read it out loud. He always asked me to read his poems aloud. He said matter of factly that the poem had woken him up in the middle of the night begging to be written, but he couldn’t find paper, so he wrote it on the wall. The poem was published without a single edit. For Shamlou, poetry bubbled from the fountain within. The first steps taken were from a sort of madness. His poems came through a trance.

      I could never access that side of him, she said. I was young, but I knew I never wanted to be with anyone else. I gave him my life, to help him soar from the muddy swamps. I couldn’t watch his greatness go to waste. When we had money, we lived. When we didn’t, we had each other. He was an endless universe. I was by his side for forty years. What else could anyone want? My epic hero, my majestic man!

      For them, everything started with a first glance. Love first, then familiarity.

      You know the rest: Wife Eternal—and still.

      Aida treated Shamlou as her personal responsibility. It was improbable for any other woman to serve Shamlou in this way. Before Aida, Shamlou had not experienced woman. And there were many in Shamlou’s life, but none who could give him the peace and space he needed, as both Aida and Shamlou concur in The Final Word. If previous encounters had been inspiring, he would have preserved those relationships, he said.

      Shamlou wondered what role love played in the life of writers who did not write of their lovers and beloveds. To Aida, the poems that Shamlou recited for her, the personal poems, were his most socially conscious ones, and the social poems were really about their lives.

      In Aida, Shamlou found not only a woman with whom he had instant chemistry, but also a muse of sorts who appeared just at the right moment when Shamlou had abandoned attempts at a conventional life, rejecting the limitations that the values of a middle-class life would impose on him. Aida instantly took it upon herself to create the conducive environment in which Ahmad would become Shamlou. She volunteered to become engulfed by Shamlou’s life. They both imbued the elusive moment of their meeting with mythical symbolism, a pivotal union.

      But muse would not encompass the totality of Aida’s role. She was assistant, lifelong devotee, and steward. Aida is widely credited with an honorary role in the birth of Modern Poetry in Iran for the care she took of Shamlou, launching a new phase in his life, and for the work she did alongside, and after him, supervising the ongoing work of posthumous publications and so much more, though she would reject any such credit. Shamlou’s inscription in one of his books, summarized here, attests to her involvement from the very beginning:

       Dearest one, this is not like any other book whose first copy I bring home to dedicate to you and watch the glee of another one of my successes in the electricity of your eyes. It is not only the product of the love you give me, the loving and secure setting you provide me, my work, and my life. It is also the result of your invaluable collaborations. One day you might pick it up and remember the spring nights of our tenth year, the nights when you heard my voice narrating and wrote the translations down, when we lost ourselves in these words. The white pages will reflect on your face, and you will be beautiful as ever…